Del. student wins literary prize

A college senior from Delaware who wrote about family, the literary life and the frustrations of dealing with physical disability won one of the nation’s largest undergraduate literary prizes Sunday.

The announcement that Hailey Reissman, 22, had won the $64,243 Sophie Kerr Prize during was made during her graduation from Washington College in Chestertown, Md. Since 1968, the college has awarded the prize to a graduating senior who demonstrates the best potential for literary achievement.

Reissman, of Wilmington, was selected from a group of 24 students who submitted writings. The English major, who minored in creative writing, submitted an approximately 80-page portfolio that included academic writing, poems, fiction and creative nonfiction. Some of her work talked about dealing with cerebral palsy.

At school, Reissman was one of the editors of the school’s main literary magazine, the Collegian, and for the past two years had an internship at a literary magazine in New York called One Story. Eventually she hopes to attend graduate school, possibly in English or creative writing.

The award is named for writer Sophie Kerr. Kerr wrote 23 novels and more than 100 stories and left more than $500,000 to the college when she died in 1965. The interest on that sum is used for the prize as well as to bring writers and editors to campus to read.

Congrats to the student who won $64,000 for the Sophie Kerr literary prize. But the $64,000 question is, if this represents only the interest on a $500,000 bequest from Sophie Kerr, that's almost a 13% per annum rate! Somebody at the school should also win a financial wiz award!